Bread and Roses in Denver

I spent this morning at a big hotel in Denver, face to face with all the reasons I am happy that I don’t have to sit at bargaining tables anymore, but also all the reasons I miss my life in the labor movement.

I was part of an interfaith clergy delegation that the housekeepers at the hotel asked to come support them as they demanded more respect, better treatment and safer working conditions from their employer. Our delegation was made up of three Protestant Christian Ministers, a Muslim Imam, and me, a Unitarian Universalist (wearing a clerical collar for the first time!! What a weird feeling that was...).

We got to the bargaining room early and had a good time meeting the housekeepers and listening to their stories. They are amazing women from all over the world: Somalia, Ethiopia, Russia, Turkey and many places in Central and South America. Although several different languages filled the air at any given time, the workers clearly understood one another in all the ways that matter most, and the air of solidarity was palpable.

Then the management bargaining team came in, their expensive suits and manicured hands striking a vivid contrast against the bright red union t-shirts and easy smiles of the housekeepers. Each member of our clergy delegation was introduced to the managers and asked to say a few words about why we were there.

It was wonderful to hear my sisters and brothers in ministry speaking from their own faith traditions in ways that were so compatible with my own. Whatever doctrinal or theological differences we may have, it feels great to know that we are united in our commitment to justice for all people.

It is not at all clear how these negotiations will play out. These housekeepers are expected to do an enormous amount of work in an amazingly short amount of time. Although the industry norm is for housekeepers to clean about 13-16 rooms per day, this hotel requires the workers to clean up to 30 rooms per day!!! This breaks down to the expectation that a single housekeeper should be able to “deep clean” (make pristine) a room in about 20-30 minutes after guests have checked out. If guests are staying there for more than one night, and the housekeepers have to clean around them, the expectation is an absurd 8-15 minutes per room!!!

They have to make their daily quotas before they go home, and if it takes longer than eight hours, they simply have to keep working until they are done – and then their hours are cut for the rest of the week so they will not have to be paid overtime. So folks routinely work through their breaks and lunch hours; only to find that even so, they still have trouble finishing their work on time.

I would love to see the corporate brains who sit around designing these quota systems in some remote cubicle somewhere have to clean rooms for a week – for a day even – under their own systems! They wouldn’t make it to lunch time.

The bottom line is this: these women are honest, hard working people – and they are being worked into the ground so that some shareholders somewhere can earn ever so slightly more at the end of the fiscal year. The work these women are doing is not sustainable, it is not healthy and it is not just. I do not know if my support will make a bit of difference, but I will continue to answer every time they call. I feel honored to know them, and my thoughts, my prayers and my actions will be with them throughout their struggle.

And I guarantee that I am going to tip a heck of a lot better every time I stay in a hotel from now on!!!

Most Offensive Editorial Ever?

This morning in the Denver Post, blogger David Sirota prompted me to click on this link by declaring that this is the most offensive economics article he has ever read. Ever.

Now that's saying something! It was hard for me to believe that anything could top some of the economic tripe I've read throught the years, with the gentle sound of blood boiling in my ears. I had to check it out.

While I encourage you, dear reader, to go ahead and read this whole column (you might want to take some saftey precautions first, like stowing away any breakables you might feel compelled to throw across the room in a spasm of helpless outrage), let me whet your appetites by sharing a little quotation first. The column is structured around a list of lessons Wall Street pundit Michael Lewis has learned about poor people over the past few months as he watches his personal fortune stumble a bit because of the collapse of the subprime mortgage industry. The following is a real gem of wisdom that never seems to get old:

"4) Our society is really, really hostile to success. At the same time it's shockingly indulgent of poor people.

A Republican president now wants to bail them out! I have a different solution. Debtors' prison is obviously a little too retro, and besides that it would just use more taxpayers' money. But the poor could work off their debts. All over Greenwich I see lawns to be mowed, houses to be painted, sports cars to be tuned up. Some of these poor people must have skills. The ones that don't could be trained to do some of the less skilled labor -- say, working as clowns at rich kids' birthday parties. They could even have an act: put them in clown suits and see how many can be stuffed into a Maybach. It'd be like the circus, only better.

Transporting entire neighborhoods of poor people to upper Manhattan and lower Connecticut might seem impractical. It's not: Mexico does this sort of thing routinely. And in the long run it might be for the good of poor people. If the consequences were more serious, maybe they wouldn't stay poor. "

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601039&sid=a5lhZkEauCu8&refer=columnist_lewis

Cute, huh? While I would like to believe this column in really just a particularly dark bit of satire, I do not think it is, although I would love to stand corrected. While many of Lewis' columns are less...evil...than this one, he does appear to have a healthy disdain for poor people and for people who (in his opinion) foolishly feel empathize with the millions of Americans who are being chucked out of their homes and onto the streets as we speak.

Blaming the poor for their own poverty is one of the oldest lines in the playbook - but blaming the poor for the investment losses of rich people takes a special sort of gall. It is such an audacious claim that it renders me almost speechless. Oh, how my heart swells with compassion for the noble rich, who are dragged down by the poor ungrateful masses!

As I sit here trying to find an appropriate way to express how I feel about this, only one word comes to mind - one of my grandmother's favourites (although I cannot deliver it with anything like the flair she can...) - POPPYCOCK!

That's right - I'm talking to you, Michael Lewis (unless I am wrong and this really is a brilliant satire; in which case, bravo to you)!

But, when all is said and done, I am still not sure that this article rises to the level of "Most Offensive Ever." There are an awful lot of horses in that race!

For example, here is one of my recent favorites - which I also suspected of being a satire. Which it wasn't, as far as I can tell.

This delightful bit of poppycock (how did I ever forget what a wonderful word "poppycock" is?!) is entitled "The Theory of the Leisure Class: An economic mystery: Why do the poor seem to have more free time than the rich?" This one was in Slate. http://slate.com/id/2161309/

The article argues that poor people have more "leisure" time than those unfortunate people who (nobly, industriously, selflessly) make money by the bucketful - a state of affairs writer Steven Landsberg sees as patently unfair. Interestingly, some of his suggested remedies seem eerily similar to those of Michael Lewis. Must be all those years of drinking the cool-aid.

That, and probably never having met a single poor person, or at least not any who weren't washing their cars or mowing their lawns.

This reminds me of a passage from "Hard Times" by Charles Dickens. Maybe these gentlemen should read it.

"For the first time in her life, Louisa had come into one of the dwellings of the Coketown Hands; for the first time in her life she was face to face with anything like individuality in conexion with them. She knew of their existence by hundreds and by thousands. She knew what results in work a given number of them would produce in a given space of time. She knew them in crowds passing to and from their nests, like ants or beetles. But she knew from her reading infinately more of the ways of topiling insects than of these toiling men and women.

Something to be worked so much and paid so much, and there ended; something to be infallibly settled by laws of supply and demand; something that blundered against those laws, and floundered into difficulty; something that was a little pinched when wheat was dear, and over-ate itself when wheat was cheap; something that increased at such a rate of percentage, and yielded such another percentage of crime, and such another percentage of pauperism; something wholesale, of which vast fortunes were made; something that occasionally rose like a sea, and did some harm and waste (chiefly to itself), and fell again; this she knew the Coketown Hands to be. But, she had scarcely thought more of separating them into units, than of separating the sea itself into component drops."